Opting Off the Tenure-Track: Why Some Faculty Choose a Different Path

by Kristen Kennedy

Recent figures put the number of contingent faculty working in colleges and universities at 65 percent of the 1.3 million faculty currently teaching in the United States. We generally read this
number as an indicator of where we are in that part of the dance called the corporate turn in higher education. And every major education organization in the U.S.—the NEA, AFT, and AAUP—has gone on record to protest the increasing use of term faculty, citing the loss of academic freedom, job security, and the things that make academic culture different from, say, working at Microsoft, among the significant consequences of embracing a consumer model in education.

In all arguments to turn back the tide, it goes without saying
that if you possess an advanced degree, and teach in a college or
university, you must want a tenure-track job. But what if we
suspend that assumption for a moment, to explore whether or
not this is, in fact, true? Are there, for example, those among
part- and full-time faculty who have not only chosen a temporary faculty position, but are fairly content, even happy, with that choice? The answer is yes. So who are these faculty, and why are they opting out?

We started our inquiry with Adjunct Advocate’s readership, asking those who favored their contingent status to give us three major reasons why they liked, and in many cases preferred, teaching off the tenure track. This study was neither scientific nor representative, but it was suggestive. With more than 50 respondents from just about every kind of institution—community
college, online schools, private and public universities—roughly
30 finished a seven-question email survey that asked additional
questions about what they would change about their positions
and whether the schools where they worked had any system of
rewards and recognition for temporary faculty. Unless named,
all respondents requested that their responses remain anonymous.

Survey Findings

In a phrase, the number one reason to opt off the tenure track
goes something like this: “I can teach when or where I want,
and I can teach what I want.” Choice and freedom were the most
cited reasons for the preference, and for most, this perk surpassed the need for security and benefits. Flexibility was the watchword for those who choose impermanent employment to accommodate the demands of family life or the desire to travel. A surprising number like part-time teaching because it bolsters their credentials for “real” jobs outside academe as consultants,
executives, and lawyers, preferring online course delivery for
the most unrestricted faculty work. Quite a few like the freedom they have as nontenure-track faculty members to dedicate
themselves exclusively to teaching.

Another attractive feature of life off the tenure track is the joy of never having to attend a department meeting or become embroiled in department politics. As one respondent wrote, “I spent fifteen years as a full-time administrator in higher education, and I don’t miss the organizational dysfunction and politics.”

The latter speaks to the reality that the grass may not always
be greener on the tenure track, which has itself become overgrown with increasing demands for publications, service, and excellent teaching evaluations, and in some fields, patents and products. Indeed, the increasing use of nontenure-track faculty has engendered a situation where more faculty compete for fewer
tenure-line positions and have to work harder and produce more
to achieve tenure. One of the part-time visiting professors I corresponded with confessed that all of her “full-time academic
colleagues are deeply demoralized and discouraged by their life
in academe,” and that “being a part-time visiting professor, I
can walk both sides of the street.”

But while freedom—to build your own schedule and teach what you want to teach—are major advantages for some, it’s certainly not the case for all. The trade-off for freedom is “almost total isolation,” according to one adjunct who recently left teaching. She added, however, that “had they offered me $30,000 and benefits and an office with a real computer and nothing more, I would have stayed and worked my you-know-what off for my students.”

Not surprisingly, lack of job security and benefits were listed
among the most significant negatives of adjunct work. All want
predictability and some recognition of what they do, but not
one of the survey participants mentioned tenure or a tenure-track job as the vehicle for these essentials. As one experienced part-timer wrote, “I know tenure is considered sacred by some, yet for me I would really just like year-to-year contracts, even part-time contracts and medical insurance.”

For the few respondents who occupy full-time nontenure-track
positions, theirs is perhaps a more attractive avenue. One new
hire at a major state university wrote that she preferred her teaching-track position because it meant that her research and publishing run according to her own clock, there was much less
committee work, and most importantly, she didn’t “feel guilty”
about focusing on teaching. Even with less job security, she felt
that the downside of her position wasn’t about the job itself, but
with attitudes from within academe. She wrote, “Most academics assume that everyone with a Ph.D. wants to be tenured, and
their tone sometimes borders on patronizing when they find out
my job is not tenure-track.”

She added that there needs to be “wider recognition that a
tenure-track job is not as prevalent as it used to be, that it’s not
the norm anymore, and that people qualified for tenure-track
positions are either not able to find a tenure-track position or
choose a nontenure-track position.”

Be Careful What You Wish For

But what happens to the collective struggle to save the tenure
system when some faculty prefer their contingent status? And
what happens when energies have been devoted to bargaining
for improvements to these temporary faculty positions? How
does a conversation about converting term to tenure-track lines
begin?

This is a quandary Alan Heinemann knows well. As the University of San Francisco Full-Time Faculty Association President from 1988-2005, he led efforts to convert part-time positions (and eliminate the overuse of adjunct faculty) to full-time, nontenure-track ones with excellent benefits and salaries equal to those of tenure-track faculty. The question for him then, as now, is still, “Are we better off making conditions for term the best they can be or are we better off making them terrible and [the administration] can’t fill the job?”

It’s an issue that comes down to whether or not “you want to
help make the situation permanent, because once you start tinkering with the tenure system, you can’t go back,” says Heinemann. Despite huge gains for both part-and full-time USF
faculty off the tenure track, Heinemann thinks the situation is
just “inherently exploitive.” Without tenure, he adds, “there is
no academic freedom. If you’re serving at the boss’s whim, then
you just can’t have security.”

It’s a devil’s bargain, too, because, as a recipient of the faculty union’s hard work, I have a hard time complaining about the two years I spent as a full-time nontenure-track assistant professor at the University of San Francisco, in a teaching-track position. A competitive salary, benefits, and a very manageable 3/3 teaching load made not having to do research less of a tragedy than you might think. With a multi-year contract and travel funds to attend conferences, not to mention an office, a computer, and the teaching schedule I wanted, I had even less to complain about. Sure, I’d never get tenure, and the administration might not renew my contract at the end of my term (and I wouldn’t, under union contract, have the option to grieve dismissal), but it wasn’t that bad, certainly not when I compared my working conditions to what most other adjunct faculty had by way of security. I mean, if I just took it at face value and saw it as a job, rather than a vocation I’d trained most of my adult life for, then it was quite nice, really.

That’s not to say there weren’t problems—there always are—but by and large, I had many days when I could see how my immediate, albeit terminal, comforts might dilute my energy to pursue long-term gains. But accepting a perspective at odds with what my education and training had led me to expect meant I had to rethink my relationship to academic culture, and when you get down to it, that’s a major piece of the controversy over what it means to be among the growing cadre of nontenure-track faculty. Anywhere we teach, it seems, instructors have to negotiate competing institutional values that separate the professoriate from the mere pedagogues. For some, survival—and sanity—means opting off the tenure track altogether; for others, it’s about changing attitudes toward what it means to have a career in higher education. But as the line between higher education and industry blurs, there are a growing number of adjunct faculty for whom scaling the walls of the ivory tower doesn’t make the list of their top five life goals. How might this increasingly diverse faculty reshape the dialogue on tenure and term lines?

Do Motives Matter?

Just how many practicing professionals are also working as
adjunct faculty is unknown. According to John Curtis, Director
of Research and Public Policy at the AAUP, that information
may be found in the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty,
courtesy of the Department of Education, but honing in on a
precise number is a hefty analytical task. We do know, however, that many adjunct faculty are hired from industry and professions to teach in a growing number of programs. Consider that these are professionals who likely couldn’t afford to live on a professor’s salary, let alone want to, and their paths to promotion don’t rely on academic freedom and publication record. As one survey respondent wrote, a full-time tenure-track job “just does not pay enough to be the sole income. Nontenure-track teaching is only practical if you have something else going for you in a regular career. We use our knowledge to give guidance as consultants or corporate managers, which pays much better. We satisfy our intellectual needs by being adjuncts.”

While this perspective is likely not the norm, it does speak to
the growing influence of a practitioner culture in higher education. Given trends in education that focus a significant component of students’ learning on skills training, universities are having to draw from a very different talent pool, combining traditional academic faculty with industry executives and practicing professionals whose experience qualifies them to teach in a
way that an academic degree does not. Many, like one respondent to our survey, see this as a positive trend in higher education. “While some might see having adjunct faculty as a problem for the education system, I think it brings more real life to the classroom environment because I have done something outside of academia.”

While we can debate the two-world theory that “real life” exists outside of universities, a more compelling question is whether diverse interests from within and without the university gates will compete or collaborate. More to the point, what happens when we don’t want the same things? How will varying levels of investment in the university and commitment to improving work conditions impact the outcome of those issues? Will these cultures collide or combine forces?

Perhaps one of the small, but memorable, examples of what happens when corporate and academic cultures clash is the response adjunct entrepreneur Jill Carroll still elicits. Carroll recommended, in the interview she did with Scott Smallwood in
The Chronicle of Higher Education some five years ago, that
adjuncts stop thinking like victims and start thinking like small-business operators. Her advice: “[D]evelop courses like products: Systematize their production until you can reap the benefits of economies of scale. Make them classes you can teach over and over, without mountains of preparation time.”

California Faculty Association representative John Hess, writing in Academe several years later, was alarmed with the “entrepreneurial adjunct phenomenon,” whereby contingent faculty negotiate more like consultants than academics, positioning
themselves as “participants in a free market for academic labor,” rather than, (I assume), scholars above market forces. The worry for Hess is that such thinking isolates individual instructors who compete for courses and diminishes collective efforts to improve conditions for all. (To be fair, Carroll advocates both roads to job security, recognizing, perhaps, that expedient means pay the bills while we’re waiting for more proletarian ends.)

Hess laments the loss of motivations that would make someone
spend a weekend at a conference or writing a paper. “Many
people no longer understand why anyone would do these things
for the fun and love of it. How sad!” And yet, the assumption widely held in academic culture that devotion to an area of
study—illustrated by love of thought, love of study, love of teaching—is often the very basis for exploiting adjunct faculty who are encouraged to believe that they do their jobs not for money, or even a living wage, but because they love it.

Perhaps then, motives do make a difference, but just how they
will change the tenor of conversations about contingent faculty
and the tenure system remains to be seen. Ultimately, though, it
really shouldn’t matter what faculty motives are for teaching
off the tenure track, according to Keith Hoeller, co-founder of
the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association and Committee
Member for the AAUP’s Contingent Faculty and the Profession.”
We have all kinds of contingent faculty, with all kinds of motives for teaching. That doesn’t detract from the need for benefits for all. What I object to is using those motives for paying them less.” At the moment, I think that’s one point on which we can all agree.